Funding feud threatens GP training

TIME is running out to ensure medical students trained in Australia will be given the hospital training needed to qualify as doctors, with Victoria and New South Wales refusing to join in a federal plan to solve the crisis.

Nearly three years after the Rudd government promised to ''end the blame game'' on health funding, the Standing Council on Health meeting between state and federal leaders on Friday descended into a bitter funding fight.

Victoria and NSW refused to find the relatively small amount of money for desperately needed doctor training, while the Commonwealth took back other funding on what the states claimed were faulty population estimates.

The states also demanded that the Commonwealth continue funding provided under national partnership agreements, due to expire from next year. They were created to ensure the states could meet ambitious emergency department and other targets.

Amid a looming doctor shortage, Western Australia, Queensland and the ACT agreed to federal Health Minister Tanya Plibersek's plan to provide funding for non-government hospitals to train medical students, in return for the states providing extra funding for public places.

The medical students have completed years of training but cannot formally qualify as doctors without undertaking hospital internships.

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Victorian Health Minister David Davis said Victoria had boosted internship places by more than 70 per cent since 2006 ''and it's now time for the Commonwealth to pull its weight''.

He said he had offered the Commonwealth a plan to boost the number of medical training places from 2013.

But if Victoria and NSW do not agree soon, time will run out for non-government hospitals - most of which have never taken on trainee doctors - to gain accreditation to teach them next year, according to the chief executive of Catholic Health Australia, Martin Laverty.

He said his organisation was first asked to help solve the training crisis in August, when it had committed to provide 70 training places in Catholic hospitals across Australia.

''We shouldn't be in a situation with this kind of five-minutes-to-midnight solution,'' he said.

Hospitals that were not yet accredited would need about two months to become so.

The Australian Medical Students Association estimates there is a shortage of 180 training places. Under the deal announced on Friday, 116 positions have been created.

The vice-president external of the association, Catherine Pendrey, said the failure to provide all the needed places would affect patients, particularly in rural and regional areas.

The medical students who will miss out on placements are international students, who have paid full fees only to be sent home without a degree.